Learning Android Intents - The Review

For the last week and a bit I have been reading a chapter per day of this book. If you are a seasoned Android pro then you know what Intents are already and this book might still be for you- more in a bit. If you are new to Android the title "Intents" might seem a bit dull and uninteresting so very quickly let me assure you they are anything but.

Android intents are a way that developers can interact with and share data between other Android apps, their own app and the Android system. Just how easily the variety of tasks can be achieved, and I mean very very easily achieved is perhaps surprising. You can do simple things like pass data to another section of your own app, initiate a phone call, capture a picture or image, use any of the Android sensors like accelerometer or gyroscope and engage with network tasks like Bluetooth connections, WiFi and NFC. Just about any major feature of an Android phone can be utilised, in some at least small way, with intents. And this book will show you exactly how.

The authors clearly no their subject area but start of nice and simple so that an Android beginner can follow along too. Every line of code to do with Intents is covered, sometimes a bit too closely but if you already know your Intents basics it is simple enough to skip a paragraph or two as needed.

The list of things you can do with just a few lines of code goes far beyond what I mentioned above and you should check the TOC to see if there is the specific topic you need covered. But if it can be done with Intents. it's probably in the book.

The authors explain that Intents are rarely meant for an app that focuses on the specific intent (pun intended) of a given area of functionality. So for example, if you are developing a video editing app or a voice recognition/text to speech (yep, Intents do that too) system then the more in-depth Android API's are probably the solution to use.

But that is why Intents and this book are so useful to just about any would-be or current Android developer. They expose the basic functionality of just about any Android system feature at the same time as hiding any hint of complexity behind the Intent API. So whatever your next hot app is going to be- you can almost certainly make it better with some added functionality from an Intent. And I definitely recommend this book to show you how.